Best To make clear at once that the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of Twelfth Night at Stratford is entirely enjoyable, even to one who found their last version, especially in its second year, the most alertly beautiful of the last thirty years or so. That one, directed by John Barton, was glowingly elegiac—as, by and large, was Toby Robertson's recent re-creation for the Prospect Theatre Company.

I hear murmurs of discontent as I talk of these performances in terms of their directors. Well, we all gird at perverse notions imposed upon a play; "director's theatre" is a well-worn term of abuse. But the theatre in general, and Shakespeare in particular, has gained far more than it has lost from the emergence of overall guiding minds to meld individual actors with the play, so that alert...